Unlike most of the other classes I have taken, I am not attempting to take comprehensive notes for this class. The class is taught on slides which go by faster than I can easily take notes for (and some of which match the textbook closely). In class I have annotated my copy of textbook with little details instead. This set of notes contains musings of details that were unclear, or in some cases, details that were provided in class, but are not in the text (and too long to pencil into my book), as well as some notes Geometric Algebra formalism for Maxwell’s equations with magnetic sources (something I’ve encountered for the first time in any real detail in this class).

The notes compilation linked above includes all of the following separate notes, some of which have been posted separately on this blog:

Unlike most of the other classes I have taken, I am not attempting to take comprehensive notes for this class. The class is taught on slides that match the textbook so closely, there is little value to me taking notes that just replicate the text. Instead, I am annotating my copy of textbook with little details instead. My usual notes collection for the class will contain musings of details that were unclear, or in some cases, details that were provided in class, but are not in the text (and too long to pencil into my book.)

Unlike most of the other classes I have taken, I am not attempting to take comprehensive notes for this class. The class is taught on slides that match the textbook so closely, there is little value to me taking notes that just replicate the text. Instead, I am annotating my copy of textbook with little details instead. My usual notes collection for the class will contain musings of details that were unclear, or in some cases, details that were provided in class, but are not in the text (and too long to pencil into my book.)

Maxwell’s equation review

For reasons that are yet to be seen (and justified), we work with a generalization of Maxwell’s equations to include
electric AND magnetic charge densities.

Integral forms

The integral forms of Maxwell’s equations follow from Stokes’ theorem and the divergence theorems. Stokes’ theorem is a relation between the integral of the curl and the outwards normal differential area element of a surface, to the boundary of that surface, and applies to any surface with that boundary

Boundary conditions

Linear time invariant

Linear time invariant meant that the impulse response \( h(t,t’) \) was a function of just the difference in times \( h(t,t’) = h(t-t’) \).

Green’s functions

For electromagnetic problems the impulse function sources \( \delta(\Br – \Br’) \) also has a direction, and can yield any of \( E_x, E_y, E_z \). A tensor impulse response is required.

Some overview of an approach that uses such tensor Green’s functions is outlined on the slides. It gets really messy since we require four tensor Green’s functions to handle electric and magnetic current and charges. Because of this complexity, we don’t go down this path, and use potentials instead.

In \S 3.5 [1] and the class notes, a verification of the spherical wave form for the Helmholtz Green’s function was developed. This was much simpler than the same verification I did in [4]. Part of the reason for that was that I worked in Cartesian coordinates, which made things much messier. The other part of the reason, for treating a neighbourhood of \( \Abs{\Br – \Br’} \sim 0 \), I verified the convolution, whereas Prof. Eleftheriades argues that a verification that \( \int \lr{\spacegrad^2 + k^2} G(\Br, \Br’) dV’ = 1\) is sufficient. Balanis, on the other hand, argues that knowing the solution for \( k \ne 0 \) must just be the solution for \( k = 0 \) (i.e. the Poisson solution) provided it is multiplied by the \( e^{-j k r} \) factor.

Note that back when I did that derivation, I used a different sign convention for the Green’s function, and in QM we used a positive sign instead of the negative in \( e^{-j k r } \).

Notation

Phasor frequency terms are written as \( e^{j \omega t} \), not \( e^{-j \omega t} \), as done in physics. I didn’t recall that this was always the case in physics, and wouldn’t have assumed it. This is the case in both [3] and [2]. The latter however, also uses \( \cos(\omega t – k r) \) for spherical waves possibly implying an alternate phasor sign convention in that content, so I’d be wary about trusting any absolute “engineering” vs. physics sign convention without checking carefully.

In Green’s functions \( G(\Br, \Br’) \), \( \Br \) is the point of observation, and \( \Br’ \) is the point in the convolution integration space.

Both \( \BM \) and \( \BJ_m \) are used for magnetic current sources in the class notes.